Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Dems ahead for both NY Senate seats

If Republicans are looking to pick up a long shot Senate seat in the Northeast this fall our polling suggests they should probably look past Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut to Kirsten Gillibrand in New York.

It's not that Gillibrand looks to be in particularly dire shape- she leads Joe DioGuardi 50-40 in our new poll- but the candidates in New York are much less defined than the ones in Connecticut and give the GOP more room for growth.

For instance while Linda McMahon is already viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters in Connecticut, 44% of New York voters have yet to develop an opinion of DioGuardi and those who have see him positively by a 32/24 margin. There's a lot more room for him to establish himself as an appealing candidate than there is for McMahon.

Similarly although Gillibrand has a decent 42/37 approval rating she's not nearly as popular as Blumenthal, who 53% of voters view favorably. Republicans would have a much better chance at turning voters against Gillibrand, who's not that well defined in the eyes of the electorate, than Blumenthal who's been around forever.

New York's expensive though and at the end of the day Republicans probably won't have the resources to really go after Gillibrand. She's losing an unusual number of Democrats to DioGuardi at 19% but she's also winning over an inordinate number of Republicans for this cycle at 23%. And she trails DioGuardi by just a single point with independents, a far better performance with that group of voters than most Democrats across the country are mustering this year.

If the odds look good for Gillibrand, they look even better for Chuck Schumer in New York's other Senate race. Schumer has a 59-37 lead over Jay Townsend. He's got his party pretty much completely behind him at 86% and he's winning the most crossover support of any Democratic Senate candidate we've polled on besides Daniel Inouye at 28%. Schumer's 57% approval rating is the best out of 60 Senators we've polled on so far in 2010.

7 comments:

This is surprising in that the numbers favoring Gillibrand are similar to Rasmussen and Marist. PPP has had the Democratic skew of all the major pollsters. DioGuardi is picking up 19% of the Democrats, an unusually high number this year. If he can up that a few points and pull Republicans and independents the way other Republican candidates are, he could win.

I can understand that while Gilibrand has a double digit lead and is over 50% that she's considered vulnerable, but its just so implausible that she could lose. For one thing, that would mean an awfully large number of voters would have to vote for Schumer AND DioGuardi. How many people are going to vote for a Tea Partier like DioGuardi and simultaneously vote for a man who could potentially be Harry Reid's replacement in the Republicans' Obama/Pelosi/Reid Axis of Liberalism?

People split their votes all the time.You could say that they it usually happens moderates and that Schumer is very liberal, while DioGuardi has made himself over as being conservative. The problem is that you have it backwards. DioGuardi isn't getting Schumer voters. Schumer is getting DioGuardi voters.

In 2008 Thad Cochran got 75,000 more votes than Roger Wicker. Those people voted for Cochran and Musgrave for the two U.S. Sentate seats. Like Cochran, Schumer is seen as someone who does a good job and represents New York well. Will Jay Townsend?

At minimum DioGuardi will get 300,000 more votes than Townsend. I'd guess it'll be 500,000.

PPP can probably tell you what percentage of Shumer voters DioGuardi is getting. Paladino is a true tea party guy and he'll probably get a similar number of Schumer voters.

I did an analysis two weeks ago, comparing two polls done in the same time frame by two different pollsters. PPP was the most Democratic. Rasmussen was generally 1.2% more Republican. Quinnipiac is skewing more Republican. SurveyUSA is skewing so Republican that it's difficult to take their numbers seriously.

You could argue that the difference between Rasmussen and PPP is so small that the margin of error could explain it. That's true, but on the whole if PPP has a candidate ahead by 10, the others who have put out a lot of polls will have it closer. This skew can explain why SurveyUSA is at D+1 and Quinnipiac is at D+6.